I am redesigning a music player. It currently uses Soundmanager2 V2.97a.20110801. But now since the HTML5 is so easy to use, is there much of a reason why I should continue using Soundmanager2? Or are there advantages to it that I am unaware of? Could you possibly help with a simple compare and contrast of the 2?
Soundmanager uses flash, HTML5 audio uses the native capabilities of the browser. A pitfall with <audio> is that you'll have to encode your audio at least twice, as mp3 and ogg.
Another thing is that older browsers, IE8 in particular, don't support <audio>. You may want to detect* audio support, and, if not, fall back to Soundmanager.
<video>, but detecting <audio> is done almost the same way.